Book Review:

Communities in Peril

by Joan Kennedy Taylor



The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions About Waco

Which Must be Answered, by Carol Moore. Gun Owners

Foundation (8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102,

Springfield, VA 22151. 1-800-417-1486), paperback,

$8.00, 494 pp.



Community Technology, by Karl Hess, Introduction by

Carol Moore, Loompanics Unlimited (P.O. Box 1197,

Port Townsend, WA  98368.  1-800-380-2230),

paperback, $9.95 + $4.00 s & h, 107 pp.



Carol Moore is a free lance libertarian journalist who

has been a member of ALF and of the Libertarian

Party, and has even contributed her libertarian

feminist perspective to ALF News in the past. 

With the publication of The Davidian Massacre and

her introduction to the republication of Karl

Hess' Community Technology (both of which have

1995 copyrights), she is focusing on a slightly

different area — the importance that some of us

find in a commitment to community living, and the

hostility that others have to these communities. 

The Davidian Massacre is an eye-opening exposé of

government wrong-doing and Community Technology is

a libertarian classic that has been too long out

of print, but both books are important reading. 

Not just for libertarians, but for all those who

wonder what inspires the libertarian dedication to

nongovernmental solutions.

Mount Carmel Center at Waco, Texas, was founded in

the 1960s in a group of ramshackle houses by Ben and

Lois Roden as an offshoot of the Seventh Day

Adventist Church, the "Branch Davidians."  In

1981, 22-year-old Vernon Wayne Howell, a

self-taught student of the Bible, came there

seeking a prophet.  He became the leading

contender for the role of prophet himself after

the Rodens died.  His rival, George Roden, drove

him out at gun point in 1984, but most of the

Davidians left with him.  There were years of

conflict and even a gun battle between Howell and

Roden, who owned Mount Carmel Center, ending in

the Spring of 1988 when Howell and his Davidian

followers paid 16 years of back taxes on Mount

Carmel (after Roden went to jail for threatening a

judge) and repossessed it under an agreement with

the county that they would finally own the

property if they occupied and paid taxes on it for

five years.  Carol Moore points out that

"significantly, that five-year period would end

during the 1993 siege."  She postulates that one

of the main reasons that the Davidians were

reluctant to surrender to the authorities and

leave the property during the siege was a fear

that by giving up occupancy they would forfeit

their property to the county.

In 1990, Vernon Howell legally changed his name to

David Koresh.  In 1991, the Davidians started

tearing down separate homes at the center and

building one large building where the community

would live and study together.  In 1992, 

Davidians from all over

the world came to the Center to celebrate Passover

— Koresh's preaching centered on prophecies of the

Apocalypse, and he said this might be the last

Passover.  The group was unconventional in other

ways; beginning in 1989, Koresh had taken a number

of women in the community as his wives, including

some teenagers, saying that he was acting on God's

command.

Not everyone agreed with Koresh's leadership.  Between

1990 and 1993, according to Moore, "as many as

twenty former members made various allegations to

the government and press," including tax fraud,

stashing of weapons, sexual goings on, violation of

immigration laws (a number of Koresh's followers

came from Australia, Canada, the Philippines, New

Zealand, and England), and "exposing children to

explicit talk about sex and violence."  Many of

these charges were orchestrated by Marc Breault, a

former Davidian who left the group to become a "cult

buster."

As a result, the Center was investigated by social

workers in 1992 for child abuse (the charges were

dropped for lack of proof), the television program

"A Current Affair" filmed an exposé, and various

federal agencies received complaints.

Perhaps because of such investigations, Koresh became

convinced that the Apocalypse would begin with an

attack on Mount Carmel Center.  For protection, the

group not only built an underground tornado shelter

but reinforced the front wall of the new building

with an additional two-foot high concrete wall and

built a concrete room to house the Center's guns.

The community ran several businesses, including a

profitable legal gun business, using a licensed dealer

who was not a member of the church.  Among other

trades, they invested in a large number of legal

semi-automatic weapons, assuming that a profit

could be made on their resale if the government

restricted their manufacture in the future.  Most

of these were kept in boxes and had never been

fired.  This activity brought them to the

attention of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and

Firearms (BATF) as early as July of 1992.  When he

was informed at that time that the BATF was

questioning the gun dealer about possible illegal

weapons at the Center, Koresh invited the agents

to come there and inspect his weapons, an

invitation that was refused.

Despite its defectors, Mount Carmel Center was not

falling apart as a community when agents from the

BATF stormed it at the end of February 1993,

supposedly to serve a warrant for David Koresh's

arrest.  It was a self-supporting, interracial,

family community of men, women, and children united

by unconventional religious and sexual ideas.  It

was a community that had cooperated with

investigative authorities, who had not been able to

find any evidence of child abuse or

illegal weapons, two of the main charges later

asserted in the media.

And it was a community whose lives and property were

then destroyed by agents of the federal government.

The Davidian Massacre is an invaluable resource book,

detailing day by day, sometimes minute by minute,

the events that led up to the first attack by the

BATF, the attack, the ensuing siege by BATF and FBI

agents, the final destruction of the center by

government forces using tanks and gas, and the

aftermath, through subsequent revelations in the

media and in Congressional hearings up to 1995.  In

fact, the only

criticism I would have of this book is that there

is so much information here that it is at times

very dense reading.  But for those concerned about

the subject, Moore presents a convincing theory in

some detail — that the BATF involved the National

Guard by falsely postulating drug activity at the

Center, as the Guard's involvement was otherwise

illegal; that in the BATF raid, armed National

Guard helicopters shot and killed four Davidians;

and that the evidence of bullet holes in vehicles

and doors and walls of the Center would not only

have exonerated the Davidians from murder charges

for killing agents in self-defense, but would have

discredited the government agencies.  Therefore,

it was necessary that the Center be destroyed in

order to destroy this evidence.  And she further

establishes a subsequent government cover-up, to

hide the facts from the general public.

The book is extremely credible, particularly because

it also painstakingly examines the evidence against

the Davidians — for example, that there may have

been some illegal weapons and that there was one

allegation that Koresh sexually used a ten-year-old

girl.  In

pursuit of the truth, Moore not only draws on a

vast array of media reports, books, e-mail

reports, and government documents, but "over fifty

hours of video tapes, over twenty hours of radio

and conference audio tapes, news and government

photographs, and personal discussions and

interviews with participants in the events and

with other investigators and interested parties."

She has a skeptical view of the two videos that have

been going the rounds of some conservative

gatherings: "Waco, The Big Lie," and "Waco, The Big

Lie Continues," since they make several allegations

she

finds to be untrue.  She concludes that in spite

of "these faults, the videos do contain enough

shocking footage and real truths to have mobilized

hundreds of thousands of citizens to seek more

information about federal crimes against the

Davidians."

One of the most chilling details about the siege and

its denouement is that the FBI cut off all

electricity to the building in March, which meant

that the Davidians were totally dependent on

flammable fluids

for heat and lighting for a month.  Kerosene lamps

were filled near the kitchen and carried to

bedrooms where they were hung on walls.  Some

rooms had propane gas tanks and butane gas

heaters.  Says Moore, "Many find it incredible

that the FBI would order tanks to smash away at a

building filled with flammable fuel and lighted

lanterns.  Some wonder if knocking large holes in

the building and collapsing the gymnasium was not

a conscious attempt to maximize the ‘flue effect.' 

Others wonder if the injection of flammable CS gas

and methylene chloride solvent — both of which

produce toxic gases when burned — was part of a plan

to accelerate the fire, and even disable

Davidians so they could not escape....  Tanks

drove thirty-six Davidians into the concrete room,

where they died, and most of the rest to the

second floor.  Many suspect tanks purposely

destroyed all three staircases, preventing easy

exit from the second floor.  There is no doubt

that Mount Carmel was systematically turned into a

fire trap.  The only question is, was it done

through criminal negligence or with intent to

commit mass murder?"

Moore is especially careful not to overstate her case

because of the increasing danger that groups with

antigovernment ideas — especially "patriots" and

militia movements — will take government excesses

such as occurred in Waco as justification for

violent actions of their own.  In her Preface she

refers to the bombing in Oklahoma City on the second

anniversary of the fire at Mount Carmel.  She says

she prays that "governments will learn to resolve

conflicts with citizens cooperatively and

non-violently — and that citizens angered by

government tyranny will learn the techniques of

assertive and effective non-violent civil

disobedience and non-violent direct action."



   On a happier note, Karl Hess and his wife, Therese,

lived and worked with community activists in the

Adams-Morgan section of Washing-ton, D.C. for five

years, convinced that independence from government

depends on economic self-sufficiency.  They

struggled to make their neighborhood self-sufficient

by raising rainbow trout in basement tanks, growing

vegetables hydroponically on rooftops, installing

self-contained bacteriological toilets, starting

their own newspaper, and holding weekly "town

meetings."  And it did work.

This community was not stormed from the outside; it

fell apart from the inside.  Specifically it was

crime that drove the Hesses from Adams-Morgan into

the hills of West Virginia.  More generally, the

community split along racial lines, with the black

majority of the

residents less interested in joining in community

work and more interested in appealing for

government grants.  "Meeting after meeting, for

instance," wrote Hess, "the idea of pooling money

was brought up, pooling money to establish

neighborhood ownership of key properties, to provide

homes for the evicted, to set new patterns

of ownership for a new kind of neighborhood. 

Plenty of ‘right ons.' No cash.  Was there any

cash?  Of course.  Even people on welfare have

disposable incomes.  The pool of money needed to

buy our neighborhood would have been relatively

modest, the weekly equivalent of a carton of

cigarettes or a bottle of whiskey from each member

of the assembly."  Instead, a "culture of poverty"

remained focused on what Hess called "program

handouts," and sometimes even on crime.  He

concluded that he and his friends couldn't break

through that culture.  "I am convinced, however,

that if the culture of poverty is to be broken in

any black neighborhood it will be broken by black

people, not by starry-eyed whites talking soul

patter."

The Hesses may not have transformed the Washington

inner city (although one delightful section of this

book tells in some detail how it might have

happened), but their story ends happily.  They went

on to build their own house and to gather together a

group of community technology enthusiasts in a small

town in West Virginia.  It is good to have this

detailed, inspiring book in print.





Libertarian Party Politics

   Ayn Rand once said that the only thing that would

transform society is books, books, and more books. 

Carol Moore is to be thanked and congratulated for

having contributed these two to our ongoing public

discussion.

[In February of this year, in response to an

autographed copy of Why Government Doesn't Work, the

National Coordinator of ALF, Joan Kennedy Taylor,

wrote a letter to Harry Browne, explaining that ALF

had an official position on abortion that his

position contradicts.  That letter is repeated here. 

The fact that ALF as an organization cannot support

Harry Browne as a nominee for the presidency doesn't

mean, of course, that individual members of ALF

cannot support him — it only means that, if they do,

it will be in spite of his position on this

important issue.]



Dear Mr. Browne:

On behalf of the Association of Libertarian Feminists,

I want to thank you for sending an inscribed copy of

Why Government Doesn't Work to ALF at the above

address.

Our members agree with the vast majority of your

positions, but unfortunately, on the one issue on

which ALF has taken an official position as an

organization, we do not agree with you.  That issue is reproductive freedom.

In the fall of 1977, ALF sent ballots to all its

members asking them to vote on the following

resolution:

"The basic human right to limit one's own reproduction

includes the right to all forms of birth control

(contraception, including sterilization, and

abortion), recognizing the dual responsibility of

both sexes.  ALF therefore opposes all practices and

all governmental actions that restrict access to any

of these means of birth control, and advocates the

elimination of all laws and practices that would

compel any woman to bear a child against her will."

The resolution was adopted.

I myself realized in late 1989 that it would be more

complete to have had a resolution that addressed

both sides of the choice question — in 1977 we had

not yet known that there were groups, such as many

secular

humanists, who supported a right to abortion, but

were very doubtful about a corresponding right to

have a child.  I therefore suggested, in ALF News

#32 (Autumn-Winter 1989) that we consider adopting

wording proposed by NARAL which the conservative,

solidly Republican legislature of New Hampshire

passed in April, 1988 (188-167 in the House and

13-11 in the Senate), substituting it for three

nineteenth-century laws still on the books that

made abortion criminal.  (Unfortunately, the new

wording was vetoed by New Hampshire's governor.)

The wording was very simple: "The state shall not

compel any woman to complete or to terminate a

pregnancy."

Although ALF took no action on this suggestion, it

indicates, I think, that many of our members,

including myself, are aware that the many people who

think as you do that abortion is wrong should also

have their right to choose against abortion

protected from an intrusive government.  Therefore,

we have no objection to your statement on abortion

calling for education and persuasion to dissuade

people from abortion.  No objection, that is, until

your last paragraph.

But we have several strong objections to your ending

your statement by saying:

"And if we have any respect for the Constitution, it

surely isn't a matter in which the federal

government has any role — either to facilitate or

stop abortion, or to prevent state governments from

stopping them."

As libertarians, we consider the action of state

governments to be government action, and the implication

that you as president would call on the states to enforce

your moral viewpoint is not acceptable to those who feel

as we do that reproductive freedom is a right.

Those of us who are constitutional scholars know that

the Supreme Court is part of the federal government,

and find your statement incomplete if not

misleading.  As president, would you be willing to

appoint Supreme Court justices who believe in the

Ninth Amendment protection of unenumerated rights,

even if that

included a right to privacy?  Or would you have a

"litmus test" as present conservative Republicans

do, accepting only those justices who do not

consider the Ninth Amendment (or as some decisions

have put it, the due process clause of the

Fourteenth Amendment) binding on the States in the

matter of abortion?  In any case, the Court (and

the president, in his position of nominating

justices) has a very important role in this

debate, which cannot be sidestepped by asserting

that it doesn't exist.

It is very disappointing to us that mainline

Republicans who are personally opposed to abortion,

like Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander, are taking a

more libertarian position on this issue than the

frontrunning candidate for the Libertarian

nomination.

Because of your stand on this issue, ALF as an

organization cannot support your candidacy.



Sincerely yours,



Joan Kennedy Taylor

National Coordinator

Association of Libertarian Feminists







Update

"Loving Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre," a lecture

sponsored by ALF in "The Individualist Feminist

Heritage" series, was given by Sharon Presley on May

12 at the facilities of Resources for Independent

Thinking in Oakland.  De Cleyre, a contemporary of

Emma Goldman, was a prominent anarchist-feminist

activist, writer, speaker, and poet in the 1890s

and the early 20th century. A passionate and

eloquent writer and speaker, she campaigned

ceaselessly for the cause of individual freedom

and the independence of women.  Sharon is

currently working on an anthology of de Cleyre's

essays entitled Loving Freedom: Selected Works of

Voltairine de Cleyre.  The collection will include

a "lost" essay by Emma Goldman written in

commemoration of de Cleyre as well as a greatly

expanded version of Sharon's biographical essay

about de Cleyre published by ALF. 

Earlier in the Spring, Sharon also gave two seminars

on "Myths of Gender" for Resources for Independent

Thinking. "Are Men and Women Really Different

Species?: Myths vs. Realties about Gender"  was

given on March 2. This covered what psychological

research shows about the actual differences or

lack of differences in behavior.  Contrary to

popular myths, current research suggests that

there are no group differences between males and

females in either verbal or math abilities, only a

small but  statistically significant difference in

spatial abilities (mental manipulation of

three-dimensional forms).  Nor is there sufficient

evidence to back up the much-touted claim by

psychologist Carol Gilligan that men and women

have different styles of moral decision-making.

On April 6, Sharon spoke on "Do Women and Men Have

‘Different Brains'?: Sex, Gender and Biology."  In

spite of the popularity of books like Brain Sex, it

is not clear that there are brain differences, let

alone differences that lead to gender role-related

behavioral differences.



A seminar entitled "What You Can Do About Sexual

Harassment In The Workplace When You Don't Want To

Call The Cops," was presented by Joan Kennedy

Taylor, on Saturday, May 18 at the facilities of

Resources for

Independent Thinking in Oakland, California.

Joan, who is writing a book on the subject, presented

strategies gleaned from managers, union officials,

and workers in construction, engineering, and Wall

Street.

  

Joan also spoke May 14 at Laissez Faire Books in San

Francisco, about the collection of Roy Child's

essays, Liberty Against Power, that she edited. 

Several members of the audience shared their fond

memories of Roy. 










ALF Membership Information








Return to the ALF Home Page